Marketo Pros and Cons Reviewed by a Marketing Technologist
March 27, 2015
Marketo Pros and Cons Reviewed by a Marketing Technologist
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Global Enterprise
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo Marketing Automation
As a marketing technology consulting company, Marketo is being used across our entire organization.
For our normal client, Marketo is used by a subset of the Marketing department, specifically Marketing Operations. It is used to extend the funnel higher up than the normal sales process, specifically with long sales-cycle clients with large B2B deal sizes. It's used for landing page creation and hosting, email marketing, leads for Sales to email and call upon, and marketing campaign success/reporting.
For our normal client, Marketo is used by a subset of the Marketing department, specifically Marketing Operations. It is used to extend the funnel higher up than the normal sales process, specifically with long sales-cycle clients with large B2B deal sizes. It's used for landing page creation and hosting, email marketing, leads for Sales to email and call upon, and marketing campaign success/reporting.
- Marketo does a good job of integrating with SFDC specifically. The sync is seamless for normal database sizes, and it latches into SFDC's native campaign structure to offer relatively simple and straightforward reporting on campaign influence for revenue.
- Once optimized, Marketo is good for rapid-fire content creation (emails, landing pages, and campaigns) that is tailored and optimized for digital marketing experiences. It can collect a broad range of data out-of-the-box which provides significant advantages compared to competitors.
- Marketo's ability to scale, technically, can be a limiting factor at times. The major dependencies are lead database size, web traffic volume, and integration with the CRM. At the point of 750k+ leads, Marketo becomes slow to work with. At the point of 10k page visits/day, queues start to pop up on logging web activity. When lots of leads are begin updated in Marketo and through the CRM, the back-and-forth usage of API calls (by which Marketo communicates with CRMs) starts to max out, and you have to really optimize the setup in order to have timely communication between Marketo and the CRM.
- Measurable ROI for campaign spend.
- Challenger/champion setup of lead nurture, allowing for improved results over time as opposed to ad-hoc email campaigns.
- Transitioning marketing departments to be more data-centric, as dashboards (with Marketo data building blocks) becomes the sources of truth and judgment of marketing campaign quality.
Pardot has a promise of native database sharing with SFDC, removing the largely limiting factor of API integrations between two siloed platforms (marketing automation platform and CRM), but this is not yet true. Pardot works for small companies who don't want to do anything complex with their marketing.
Eloqua is a contender for enterprise-level marketing automation platform, but its usability is less than Marketo. It's more made by engineers, made for engineers.
Hubspot isn't an actual contender, as it has different offerings which make a good case for one-person-marketing-teams for very small businesses.
Eloqua is a contender for enterprise-level marketing automation platform, but its usability is less than Marketo. It's more made by engineers, made for engineers.
Hubspot isn't an actual contender, as it has different offerings which make a good case for one-person-marketing-teams for very small businesses.
More than 5 million